Peter Rowlett, MSOR Network
Introduction
Having seen several people trying to use social media to engage their students, I was interested to discover what people were trying, what worked and what didn’t. I asked various people if they would run a workshop on the topic and got a common response: “Oh, I’m just playing around. I don’t know enough about it to run a workshop”.
Seeing several people trying out an emerging area of practice and no clear information on or evidence of good practice, I felt the opportunity was open for a preliminary discussion. I invited a small group to an open discussion meeting at the University of Birmingham themed around ‘Using social media to engage students’. This paper is a report from that workshop. I don’t want to claim that everything in this paper represents my view or a consensus of everyone at the meeting but I hope I have presented a fair account of the issues raised and the discussions which took place. I hope it will serve as an aide to discussion of approaches in this emerging area of practice.
Uses of social media
In the opening introduction to the workshop I gave a list of examples of services which might be included in a discussion of social media�� It is difficult to know whether to include areas where students or lecturers create content such as blogging, photo or video sharing sites, but we decided to use a broad definition�� In case these are of interest, they are (in no particular order): social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn; photo sharing sites such as Flickr and Pinterest; video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo; blogging through various platforms including Tumblr. In discussion, we added services which allow users to share links to interesting web content and tag these with appropriate keywords, for example Delicious. In common with all technology, what services are available is not as interesting as what might be done using these. I suggested aims for using these technologies might include the following. • Classroom engagement
e.g. to encourage discussion and feedback in lectures. Students use phones, laptops or tablets to send messages to the lecturer or class, avoiding anxiety over speaking in front of a large group. Some services would allow students to use a pseudonym for anonymity.
• Building a community
e.g. to share links and interesting content, to keep students in discussion outside of lectures. • Doing or organising project work
e.g. putting students in groups on a social network so they can share content relevant to projects they are working on.
• Students sharing content they had produced
e.g. asking students to produce a video for YouTube when you might previously have asked them to produce a poster.
• Careers awareness or job hunting
e��g�� students using a network like LinkedIn to increase their professional profile and investigate potential employers.
• Making wider connections
e.g. reaching professionals through a social network to gain different views on a discussion. As an example, before the workshop I had asked on Twitter for teachers and lecturers to send examples of their use of social media with students and reviewing these aided this discussion greatly.
• Outreach
e.g. reaching potential students and applicants online and receiving feedback from attendees at open days.
• Lecturers’ professional development
e.g. accessing a professional network to gather ideas for teaching or discussion of teaching practice. For example, maths teachers on Twitter have #mathchat [1].
In discussion of this list we added two-way communication with individual students, which was to be a feature of the talk by Ed de Quincey.
Several Twitter users who contributed remotely make use of various social media technologies to share content with their students, either extracurricular (videos, cartoons, jokes,
competitions, news) or course related (coursework reminders, information about cancelled lectures). Several made use of course hashtags on Twitter. This is a way for all students on the course to find each other and talk to one another about the course and is a system that works well at conferences�� For e�ample, “#hestemsoc” in figure 1 is a hashtag used to collect tweets from our workshop.
We got the impression from reviewing some of the examples of use that a lot of use is broadcasting to students with little evidence that students are reading or responding. In what follows I will summarise the use of social media by three speakers and then offer, combined, a summary of the discussion that took place.
Case study: use of Twitter in digital media at the University of Greenwich, Ed de Quincey
Ed de Quincey intended to use Twitter for three purposes:
1�� As an alternative method for posting useful course specific information to students e��g�� links to articles, emergency changes to lecture times etc.;
2. To enable students to ask questions about courses e.g. clarifying something from a lecture, asking about coursework specifications etc��;
3. To encourage students to help each other and create a community of practice.
Ed had produced some summary statistics on his and his students’ use of Twitter. He found that most students were willing to sign up and sent at least one message but few continued to make use of the service if they weren’t already active users. His Twitter account had around 80 students as followers out of 102 students on the two modules with which he used Twitter. Ed suggested hashtags for students to organise their contributions. However, he found that most use of hashtags came from his own account rather than from the students.
Ed’s account had sent 289 tweets during the modules�� 56% (161) of these were @mentions, meaning in response to other users�� Ed said he didn’t send an @mention to students who hadn’t first sent him one, so this means over half of his tweets involved two-way interaction with individual students�� Ed received 93 public @mentions from 32 Twitter users, about 30 of which were students (the others being staff), and 40 private direct messages from 11 students (with some overlap between the 30 and the 11).
Ed concluded that Twitter was a good method for communicating with individual students to resolve issues quickly and this was the main benefit�� Of course, email could also provide this function but Ed regarded Twitter as having several advantages. A limit to length of messages of 140 characters means that messages sent via Twitter are concise and replies can be quick
also. There is no need to follow email etiquette such as salutations and sign-offs, making this an efficient method of communication�� In addition, apart from private direct messages, replies sent to students are public so all students can see the question and its answer. Ed reported an absence of duplicate questions on the same topic and wondered if the public forum was a reason for this.
Case study: use of Facebook and Twitter in mathematics at Greenwich, Noel-Ann Bradshaw
Noel-Ann Bradshaw talked about use of Facebook and Twitter at Greenwich with current students and prospective students.
With current students, use of Facebook evolved out of the undergraduate Maths Society Facebook group. Noel-Ann interacts with students and the site is used as an online community for current undergraduates and staff to interact. Noel-Ann said that if she notices it is a
student’s birthday she would make a point of wishing them “Happy Birthday”. She said a good relationship as personal tutor with students can result from this and sending messages like “I’m looking forward to seeing the student presentations today”.
With prospective students, there is a university policy that Facebook and Twitter should be used and the School has a communications officer to assist with this�� Noel-Ann said it was a useful way to get feedback from attendees at open days. She also reported applicants using Twitter to ask questions such as “What’s the weather like there?” or “How do I do ... [something about applying]?” She said this can be labour-intensive but it is useful to deal with small queries.
Case study: use of Twitter in mathematics at Chester, Jason Roberts
Jason Roberts reported that there seemed to be a general shift towards making more use of social networking tools within other departments of the University. After a module in which students created videos, YouTube was investigated as a method to distribute these. Jason started using Twitter with one module to share news involving applications of mathematics with the aim of encouraging career aspirations among mathematical modelling students. Later this expanded to the student cohort generally so anything to do with careers and news relating to mathematics was shared.
Jason warned of the risk of secondary purposes expanding use of this service. He resisted the university listing his Twitter account for applicant enquires due to time restraints. He is considering asking students to look into what mathematicians are doing with social networking as an ‘experiential learning’ project.
Putting mathematics online
One key obstacle to using these services is when the need arises to include mathematics notation in communications. To this end, Christian Perfect gave a presentation on technologies which could be used to put mathematics on the web.
MathJax is “an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers”, requiring no font installation or browser plugins and designed to be compatible with screenreaders [2]. To install MathJax just requires a piece of code added to the header of a webpage. Christian demonstrated MathJax working on his blog and gave information about easy installation on most popular blogging platforms [3]. This may also work on university VLEs, for example Moodle.
However, most social networking services do not allow users to edit the page header and so MathJax cannot be installed on sites like Twitter and Facebook. In this case, Christian offered a ‘bookmarklet’ [4]. This piece of code can be added as a button on your web browser and will run MathJax on any page. As an example, he asked me to post some LaTeX code to Twitter and ran the bookmarklet�� I tweeted “#hestemsoc @christianp is asking us to tweet LaTeX to this
Figure 1 – The result of running the MathJax bookmarklet on a tweet containing some LaTeX
We discussed the use of these approaches. For the second method, the user is required to click a button to turn the LaTeX into formatted mathematics. Although we hope students, seeing the LaTeX code, would remember what they needed to do, this is a barrier to overcome when using this method�� The first method is preferable because it requires nothing of the user�� If one wishes to encourage students to ask questions about the mathematical content of their work then comments on a blog which displays LaTeX code as formatted mathematics may be considerably preferable to email. We discussed the advantages this would have in collecting all answers given to student queries, to make sure no student is getting privileged information.
Issues discussed
Style
We discussed style. Some Twitter accounts seem to be focused around broadcasting messages and not interaction but some, despite being from large organisations, manage to adopt a chatty, informal style and engage well with other users (for a discussion of the approach taken by the Times Higher Education Twitter feed, see [5]). We felt this approach might encourage a greater level of engagement than formally broadcasting links and course reminders.
We discussed the need to just be factual on professional accounts, for example when informing students about news involving mathematics. There are issues in starting to offer opinion on subjects for a broad audience and in any case it is desirable for students to be given the facts and left to form their own opinions.
Students creating content
Some services offer more specialist use than the general services such as Facebook or Twitter. For example, LinkedIn can be linked to graduate skills development and might be used to build an online portfolio. We wondered whether LinkedIn could be used for PDP portfolio-type tasks, so that the students would be creating something that lasts beyond university. LinkedIn users can request ‘recommendations’, public references that are placed on their profiles�� The suggestion was that lecturers could do this for students but that this can create added workload. However, the potential for keeping in contact with alumni has advantages. Students need to be aware that what they say on these networks is public and often permanent. Since we hope students might go onto careers, we should be careful about developing their awareness of managing their online profile using these services that we may have encouraged them into using.
Whether to keep personal use of social networks separate
Ed de Quincey and Jason Roberts both have separate personal and professional accounts on services such as Twitter. This can be confusing but helps to keep personal and professional lives separate.
An alternative would be to have an account for each module. However, this was seen as more impersonal and Ed reported the advantage of having students connected to your own account in terms of keeping in contact with alumni, while students are likely to disassociate a module account when they finish the module��
University policy and related issues
Concern was raised over whether we could expect all students to own a smartphone capable of using some of this technology, for example for sending messages to Twitter while in class. Some universities have a policy that the university systems (VLE, internal email, etc.) should be the primary method to communicate with students. In discussion we agreed these third party services should never replace university systems but that duplicating messages in multiple locations might improve their chances of being read.
We discussed guidelines for using these services. Some universities are encouraging staff to use social media but do policies exist for use of these and, if so, are such policies realistic? Additionally, some universities have policies regarding contact with applicants that might be relevant.
In common with most innovative curricula and new technology use, the concern was raised whether this technology was only being used by the students who are already engaged, and therefore whether it is widening the gap between students.
Time for doing this is an issue. There was a sense that people are generally not getting credit (say, against workload allocation models) for engaging with students and applicants in this way. If you are the only person in a department who is doing this you might attract a lot of extra work because students would rather send a message this way than email the correct person for their query.
There is a tendency for policy to lag behind fast-moving technology and a need for those compiling policy to have an understanding of the technology involved.
Pastoral care and access to student personal information
There was a discussion about what responsibility the lecturer might hold by being more aware of the students’ personal circumstances. At the less serious end, what should a lecturer do about students who are giving their location online when they should be in lectures? More seriously, students might reveal personal issues that could cause a duty of care for the lecturer. We discussed whether the lecturer had a responsibility to follow up on such cases and whether this placed an additional pressure on lecturers. Noel-Ann Bradshaw said that where she sees from postings on Facebook that a student has problems she would follow this up with a brief enquiry sent as a private message along the lines of “I know this is none of my business but I saw on Facebook that you said ... and wondered if you are okay”. She said this approach has certainly saved several students from dropping out of university and, though she is aware that this is a sensitive issue, to date no student has responded negatively to such an approach. In a related issue, we heard about a circumstance in which students were believed to be cheating via a Facebook group. Lecturers could see which students were members of the group but not what messages were being exchanged. In that case you at least have a list of students whose work you may examine for evidence of plagiarism, which is more information that one might expect if the students were conducting this activity in person or via email. We discussed whether using social networks to broadcast and deal with direct student queries while making a clear policy not to look at students’ general messages would avoid this issue but decided this removed the social aspect that was one of the valuable features.
We discussed the issue of invading students’ personal environment. Generally, the advice that emerged was to not connect with a student on a social network site uninvited but to let the student make the approach�� Students can benefit by using a social network and engaging with peers without interacting at all with staff and we should be encouraging such informal interaction and peer support. Taking this further, one might decide not to send a message to a student except in response to a direct query, although this might lose something of the social spontaneity of the system.
Next steps
We felt there was certainly value to be had from using social media with students. We heard about services being useful for short message interaction with students, perhaps more so than email. Much use of Twitter is broadcasting information the lecturer believes is of interest to students but we felt further investigation was needed to determine whether students were engaging with such content. We also heard about the value of these services for engaging with potential applicants and applicants, and for students to create and publish content that will help them build an online profile that will persist beyond university��
However, with all the potential value there are plenty of issues for lecturers and institutions to consider. This was a fruitful initial discussion on this topic but certainly further investigation is recommended.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the attendees at the discussion meeting, Ed de Quincey, Jason Roberts, Noel- Ann Bradshaw and Christian Perfect, for their contributions which have shaped this report, and